The availability of user-generated content on the Internet keeps increasing due to pervasive use of online community systems such as forums, question and answer (Q&A) sites or social networks by people of all age groups and origins. However, the quality of such content in terms of intelligibility, accuracy, and relevance to a given topic varies drastically from excellent to spam.
The functionality of online community systems evolves to enable users to generate an increasingly richer variety of information in addition to content itself, e.g. user-generated feedback such as votes or ratings.
However, user-generated feedback may suffer from bias due to user-felt social obligations e.g. for direct reciprocity, which are inherent to all kinds of social interactions.
Accordingly, computer-implemented methods adapted to reliably evaluate, sort and triage vast amounts of user-generated contents to mine high-quality content are desirable.
Economists observe that exchange within human communities is very generally structured around reputation and regard-based behaviors (see “Between the gift and the market: the economy of regard” by Avner Offer in Economic History Review, L3 3 (1997), pp. 450-476).